TIANANMEN, TWENTY YEARS HENCE: WHAT FRANCE HAS FORGOTTEN

By Harold Hyman

PARIS, 5 JUNE 2009 - The student protesters at
Tiananmen Square in 1989 felt that two nations in the world
were beacons for their cause: the United States and France.
That was a time when, arguably, the the People's Republic of
China was not yet a daunting behemoth, and when Chinese civil
society was still adolescent and the parental authority still
benign. Confucius, as it were, had not been resurrected yet,
and youthful political dreaming was possible while the
Communist party was in flux.

For so many students at Tienanmen Square, France was an
imaginary model of human rights and democracy almost as much as
the United States.

The protestors had indeed constructed a goddess of democracy in
the image of the Statue of Liberty, the famous statue which the
French Republic commissioned the sculptor Bartholdi to build as
a gift for the Centenary of the United States. This
Franco-American symbolism may have been marginal to the
protestors; not so the reputation of France as "the nation of
Laws" (Fa Guo meaning "F" country in Mandarin: in other words,
the first initial of the country, and also the other meaning of
the character for F: law). This coincidence of meaning is
telling: for so many students at Tienanmen Square, France was
an imaginary model of human rights and democracy almost as much
as the United States. Laws, after all, are products of
democracy and freedom

Feeling for the Dissidents: The Epitome of Leftist
Cool

In the aftermath of the Tienanmen repression, the students not
yet arrested, or initially released, secretly sought contact
with foreign consulates as a means of obtaining political
refugee status. Of course, the consulates could only materially
help a few individuals by whisking them out of China. The
French consular authorities also helped many dissidents who
made it to British Hong Kong: passage to France was easily
granted. The Socialist government of President FranÃ§ois
Mitterrand, his Prime Minister Michel Rocard, and the Socialist
party as a whole, supported the granting of political asylum to
hundreds of these students. Most of them stayed in France long
enough to arrange their next move to the United States. The
most media-famous dissident, Wuer Kaixi, transited to France
before ending up in Taiwan. An ironic choice of destination: in
1989 Taiwan was still under the single party rule of the Kuo
Min Tang.

Many of these dissidents did however stay in France. A group of
French sympathizers from the start gave them moral and material
support. Such is the case of Marie Holzman, a China specialist
who had studied in China right after the Cultural Revolution
and who attended the first political trial against a dissident
many years before the Tienanmen. Her curiosity earned her a
permanent expulsion from the People's Republic. She has
appeared at every dissidents' meeting, and keeps the cause
alive, out of love for the Chinese people.

The whole of French public opinion got fired up. Being
favorable to the Communist regime had suddenly become very
uncool.

Back to 1989: the welcoming attitude of FranÃ§ois Mitterrand and
the Socialist Party meant that the United States and Canada did
not become the sole beacons of democracy. The French Communist
Party took no clear stand, and had become irrelevant in foreign
affairs since it backed General Jaruzelski against Lech Walesa
in Poland some years earlier. The French right was
paradoxically divided over how to react: human rights often
conflict with realpolitik which is a Gaullist specialty. Two
slivers of the French right did join the pro-dissident wave:
the extreme right, out of anti-communism; and the Christian
Democrats types, those who place Liberty on an ideological
pedestal above Nation. The NGOs and associations that belonged
to the Socialist Party's galaxy all pressed to help the
dissidents. So did the Catholic Church. The alternative and
left-leaning press joined in. The whole of French public
opinion got fired up. Being favorable to the Communist regime
had suddenly become very uncool. Appearing on Paris's Trocadero
place (where human rights events are staged weekly) with the
dissidents became very ''in.'' A boat called the Goddess of
Democracy was chartered out of France to broadcast radio
content to the dissidents from off the Chinese coast - the
enterprise ended in semi-failure, with the boat bankrupt in
Taiwan.

Helping Dissidents and Taiwan too

Other factors added to pro-dissident sentiment: the emerging
infatuation with all things Chinese, {ed note: delete comma}and
the wholesale disenchantment with everything Soviet or
dictatorial. This mood was positively palpable in Paris at the
time. Some people were sending endless faxes to the Chinese
government to jam their reception capacities. My observation
was that France helped the dissidents even faster than the U.S.
did, because the French Left establishment may have been proud
of undercutting the U.S.'s new coziness with the authorities in
Beijng.

Yet Taipei saw an opportunity: why not buy French weapons?

But the call of America, and the offers to teach from several
American universities, ended up emptying France of at least
half the dissidents. The tradition of appointing foreign
dissidents as faculty was nearly unknown in France at the time,
and the diplomatic reaction of all Western Democracies to the
Communist regime was lead by the U.S. in the United Nations.
And then the French Left lost the 1993 legislative elections, a
new conservative Prime Minister was imposed on Mitterrand, and
the whole China bashing began to end as Realpolitik.reasserted
itself. But not before one last blow was delivered to the
Chinese Communist Party.

Frigates for Taiwan: A Side-Effect of
Tienanmen

While the democratic governments were busy diplomatically
freezing out the Communist regime, a small number of Taiwanese
lobbyists found an avenue to the decision levels of French arms
sales. Suddenly, Taiwan reared its head and Ministers were
listening. The island's government fancies itself the Republic
of China founded by the Kuo Min Tang in 1911, but has had no
diplomatic relations with France since 1961 or the U.S. since
1981, because any country that recognizes the People's Republic
in Beijing must break relations with the Republic of China in
Taipei. Yet Taipei saw an opportunity: why not buy French
weapons? Strangely, Washington was punishing Beijing
commercially while still not daring to sell Taipei heavy
weapons. A quick reminder: when any State recognizes the
People's Republic, it relinquishes all heavy arms sales to
Taiwan in the bargain.

In the early 1990s, France's Socialist government, taking
advantage of the diplomatic isolation of the People's Republic
as a result of the Tienanmen repression, dared to break this
restriction and sold the Taiwanese navy several top class
frigates - Lafayettes, indispensable defensive ships with
computerized missile tracking - along with a squadron of Mirage
jet fighters for the Taiwanese Air Force. The People's Republic
was furious; French contracts in China were frozen. But France
sold and delivered these heavy weapons to Taiwan, and the
island's defenses were much strengthened. Unfortunately, the
illicit commissions and kickbacks on these sales were
astronomical, and many politicians, both Socialist and
conservative, seem to have been gratified, although the
inquests have never fully revealed who did what. Of course, for
the Tienanmen dissidents, it really did not matter. They were
no longer an issue. Economics was the issue, and arms sales are
big money.

Chirac the Oriental

With the Left losing the post of Prime Minister in 1993, the
mood in France changed: the Conservatives, who went on to carry
the presidency in 1995 with Jacques Chirac, started rebuilding
the bridges with the People's Republic. Chirac is a complex
man, and his knowledge of the Far East is tremendous. He had
been several dozens of times to Japan, China and Korea, and he
figured that both the dissidents and Taiwan were to be
sacrificed. Elegantly, he continued to supply spare parts to
the Taiwanese Navy and Air Force, and no dissident was expelled
to China.

In Chirac's mind, as democracy was not to be in Mainland China,
and even though it had finally arrived in Taiwan, the economic
reality of the Chinese market carried the day. The French
president organized this reversal with consummate speed, egged
on by Bill Clinton's similar turnaround. The arms contract to
Taiwan was never to be repeated and, in 1997, the Taiwanese
authorities took revenge by cancelling the nearly-signed
contract to build the French High Speed Train on the island.

Better to be Tibetan than a Chinese Dissident in
France:

Twenty years to a day later, the impact of the Chinese
dissidents on French public opinion is desperately slim.
Everyone has learned to live with the People's Republic, and
accept the Communist Party as a lesser evil. The French
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just like the U.S. State
Department, periodically asks the Chinese government to improve
its human rights record notwithstanding that China forbids
multiparty elections of nearly every sort. This superficial
conscience healing is unhelpful to the dissidents. They had
even hoped France would boycott the Olympics in Beijing, and
the foremost dissident in France, former political prisoner Wei
Jinsheng, tried to raise consciousness on this point to any
journalist like myself willing to take notes.

The French public has however found a new cause in the
Tibetans. An example of this: during the Olympic Flame Marathon
in Paris, the pro-Tibetan hecklers almost managed to put out
the torch, despite the French police. Even President Nicolas
Sarkozy has said positive things about the Dalai Lama. Of
course, one cause for this increased Tibetan sympathy is the
inroads being made by Buddhist ideas in France. A good example
of this is the fact that the Dalai Lama's spokesman is a
Frenchman, son of a very famous journalist-intellectual of the
Liberal right (FranÃ§ois Revel).

In the end, at the ceremony at Trocadero Square on Wednesday
the 3rd of June, a good part of the several hundred protestors
were Tibetan. A strange twist of history, considering how
little the dissidents seemed to care about the cause of Tibetan
national rights. And a strange twist for France: it is
incapable to be a bridgehead for either Chinese democracy or
Tibetan rights, even though public opinion has often been
favorable to these things; and it is unable to disrupt the
China-U.S. relationship by playing a French hand in the great
China game. Being the capital of a Free China was just too big
for Paris, or for France, or for any country in the world. But
it was almost believable for a while.

Harold Hyman is a Franco-American journalist, based in
Paris, specializing in foreign affairs and cultural diplomacy.
He works for BFM TV.